The sultan agreed to share Jerusalem with the emperor. Like a modern peace deal in the Middle East, the Muslims kept the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), the Christians got the rest of Jerusalem. Frederick arrived in Jerusalem to reclaim the Holy City, where he showed his unusual respect for Islam. In the church of the Holy Sepulcher, he held a crown-wearing ceremony to promote his vision of himself as Christian emperor. But he then had to flee—pursued by the papal ban. He ruled Jerusalem from afar for ten years—but the majority of his life was devoted to his war against the papacy.
Papal policy had dictated his upbringing. His father, Emperor Henry VI, had challenged the popes for leadership of Christendom. After Henry’s sudden death, the curia ensured the division of his lands: two other candidates were installed in the German kingdom, while the infant Frederick was left with Sicily. His mother died shortly afterward, and the four-year-old king of Sicily became a ward of the papacy. After his German replacements had proved too territorially ambitious, Frederick was reinstalled as a teenager in his northern titles, but not before his erstwhile guardian, Pope Innocent III, had extracted from him promises of extensive papal privileges and numerous vows never to reunite Germany and Sicily under one ruler.
Frederick, however, refused to be a puppet. He saw the Holy Roman Empire as sacred and universal. His conception of imperial sovereignty drove him to extend his authority into the Italian states that lay between his northern and southern lands.
Frederick’s conflict with his former guardians overshadowed European politics for half a century. On one level the gigantic struggle was simply a personality clash between the piously intellectual Pope Gregory IX, elected in 1227, and the witty and worldly Frederick. When Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick in 1227 for apparently malingering rather than going on crusade, Frederick’s decision to go anyway, and in the process crown himself king of Jerusalem, did little to improve relations.
At the heart of this bitter conflict lay the question of who would dominate Christendom: pope or emperor. With each side buoyed up by a messianic belief in his cause, Italy became the battleground of papal troops and imperial forces. Missives, manifestos, papal bulls and insults flew across Europe. Frederick was again excommunicated. If he was the Wonder of the World to his admirers, he was henceforth Beast of the Apocalypse to his enemies. Two different popes, Gregory IX and Innocent IV, fled Rome, the former dying in exile. In 1245 Innocent IV fired the papacy’s ultimate salvo: he announced the emperor was deposed. For the next five years it was all-out war. In the end it was death, not the papacy, that defeated Frederick. Fighting on against the almost insurmountable twin obstacles of excommunication and deposition, Frederick was regaining ground in both Italy and Germany when he died suddenly in 1250.
ISABELLA & ROGER MORTIMER
1295–1358 & 1287–1330
The tongue devises mischiefs, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. You love evil more than good, and lies more than honesty.
Psalm 52, read to Roger Mortimer by his executioner
They were the couple—an adulterous French queen and her English baronial lover—who invaded England, overthrew her husband the king, and ruled the country for three tumultuous years. Mortimer was the first son of Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Wigmore, and his wife, Margaret de Fiennes, second cousin to Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I. His grandfather had been a close ally and friend of King Edward I, and in return for their service to the crown the family had enjoyed royal patronage ever since. Roger married Joan de Geneville, the daughter of a neighboring lord, in 1301, when he was just fourteen, her eventual inheritance, coupled with his own, helping to swell the already vast family estates in the so-called marcher lands on the border of England and Wales.
In 1307, King Edward I died and his son became Edward II. Cowed by his terrifying father as a boy, young Edward, though outwardly imposing, was timid and easily led—a weakness that others eagerly exploited. First to do so was Piers Gaveston, a onetime companion to the prince who may have been his lover and was certainly his best friend. The king showered him with privileges. In 1308, Edward traveled to France to marry Isabella, sister of the king of France. Isabella was a stunning creature, described by one contemporary as “the beauty of beauties.” But her life was fraught with humiliations and triumphs, and in the end Edward’s neglect led her to betray him.
Isabella was the only surviving daughter of Philip IV of France. When she was no more than an infant, Philip proposed her as the future wife of the heir to the English throne, with the aim of easing tensions between the two countries. The marriage duly took place in Boulogne in 1308. Isabella was only twelve years old; the lackluster Edward II was twice her age.
Edward II was tall, fair-haired, handsome—and almost certainly homosexual, favoring as he did a succession of young, good-looking male courtiers. Before he even returned to England after his marriage he had passed on Philip’s wedding gifts to Piers Gaveston. Although Isabella bore him four children, Edward rarely showed her any affection, leading her to describe herself as “the most wretched of wives.” Furious and resentful, the country’s barons eventually rebelled in 1312, and Gaveston was executed by order of the earl of Lancaster. To their dismay, a voraciously greedy, ambitious and ruthless new favorite took his place—his name Hugh Despenser. In 1306, Hugh had married Eleanor de Clare, a granddaughter of Edward I, and through the king’s patronage he secured ever more wealth, land and influence, becoming royal chamberlain in 1318 and one of the richest nobles in the kingdom. Isabella feared and loathed the thuggish Despenser.
The Despensers’ lands bordered the Mortimers’, and the families hated each other. When Hugh tried to expand his territories into south Wales, threatening Mortimer’s own interests in the region, loathing for the Despensers finally outweighed his loyalty to the king and he joined the earls of Hereford, Lancaster and Pembroke—equally disenchanted with the king’s behavior—in open rebellion. In August 1321, the Contrariants, as they were known, marched to London, where they forced Edward to banish their hated rivals. The king, however, swiftly mobilized support and a royal army, Hugh Despenser and his father among them, marched west to confront the rebels. In January 1322, abandoned by his allies, Roger surrendered in Shrewsbury.
Mortimer was imprisoned for the next two years in the Tower of London, but after drugging his jailers, he escaped from his cell, climbed out of the Tower through a chimney, crossed the Thames in a waiting boat, and rode to Dover, from where he crossed to France. He was warmly welcomed in Paris by Edward’s enemy and Queen Isabella’s brother the French king, Charles IV. The following year, in a dispute over Edward’s French territories, Edward sent Queen Isabella, accompanied by their son, the heir to the kingdom, Prince Edward, to negotiate a settlement. Isabella despised Hugh Despenser as much as Roger did: Mortimer and Isabella soon became lovers.
In 1326, having moved to Flanders, Isabella and Mortimer gathered an army of 700 men and invaded England, intent on revenge. The Despensers, caught by surprise, were routed, and, within the month, King Edward, deserted by his nobles, was captured by Mortimer’s forces in south Wales. Brutal reprisals followed. Hugh’s father was hanged and beheaded in Bristol in October 1326. The following month, at Hereford, Hugh himself was dragged behind four horses, hanged to the point of suffocation, cut down just before he died, then tied to a ladder where his penis and testicles were sliced off and burned before his eyes. While he was still conscious, his abdomen was cut open and his entrails and heart removed. Afterward, his head was hacked off and mounted on the gates of London, while the four quarters of his body were sent to Bristol, Dover, York and Newcastle.